WSO2 Launches Eclipse Tool For Carbon Middleware

Does the world really need another set of development tools? There's Visual Studio from Microsoft, Oracle/Sun's Java Studio Creator, Zend Studio for PHP, and dozens of others. Every developer, it seems, must have a studio of one's own.

WSO2, an open source company in Mountain View, Calif., and Columbo, Sri Lanka, now offers Carbon Studio for developing applications for its lightweight, web services-oriented Carbon middleware, now in use at eBay and major enterprise sites, such as Deutsche Bank, Prudential, and Kaiser Permanente.

Carbon Studio plugs into the Eclipse Programmer's workbench, giving its users the familiar Eclipse integrated development environment with code editing, debugging, and source code control. The emergence of its Eclipse tooling after two years in development allows WSO2 to reach a wider audience for its middleware.

The tooling helps those "who don't have time to fool around" with specialist, lightweight Java application servers and web services standards, said Sanjiva Weerawarana, CEO of WSO2 and a former developer for IBM who helped write the standard for Business Process Execution Language or BPEL. It's now possible for any programmer familiar with Eclipse to start building Carbon applications that automatically work with WSO2 middleware, he said.

That middleware specializes in its use of a small footprint and efficient performance in web services and Java services settings. It includes WSO2 Application Server, Enterprise Service Bus, Governance Registry, and Identity Server, as well as an across-the-board management console, Carbon 3.0, that can assemble an integrated set of such products making use of shared services, such as security, clustering, logging operational data, and tracking deployments.

The Carbon Studio tools allow developers to test and debug application code inside the Eclipse IDE. The Carbon Archive format allows an application to be saved in multiple versions and exported into a production environment, with the different versions of services involved tracked in the deployment.

Weerawarna said the tooling reflects "WSO2's commitment to continuously search and destroy the hassles that developers and IT staff encounter and help businesses fully realize the contributions of SOA to the bottom line."